If the hacker group Anonymous is to be believed, one Middle Eastern dictator's email password is "12345" ... or it was, until they decided to share much of his (and his staff's) email with the world. Can this really be true?

How long do you think it will be before Governments/courts start doing password bounties?

Is there something preventing them from doing this?

Such as password reuse which will cause problems for the person or sensitive information in the password like it could contain a SS#?

Since all you need is the header/parts of the encrypted data those can be given out and anyone can try to crack it. Speaking of... is there any software that hides where the "header" is depending on the password?

The NYT has an article called "How Companies Learn Your Secrets". The short answer seems by bribing, manipulating, and lying to you. But the article takes six web pages to say that, presumably to up the page views for the NYT advertisers.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry's annual report on the music industry has interesting data both on the amount of piracy taking place and music industry efforts to combat it (second half of .pdf)

@Daniel,
15 minutes is only for very short gene sequences. To sequence the whole genome of a person that device would take 6 hours. And it's currently not able to do that, they're still working on the version that can.

DNA matches don't match the whole sequence. It would be rather pointless anyway since we share rather a lot of our DNA with other individuals (and species) - so they use short sequences of non-coding DNA.

In theory since this DNA doesn't code for any vital function it is more random. In practice if you are from a small genetic population it can be very non-random.

Of course - courts, prosecutors and police are very careful to explain the difference between population and sample statistics to a jury, and most juries are highly expert in Bayesian statistical techniques.

There have been several stories over the last few months about the NYPD becoming so paranoid about Muslim terrorists that it's been getting itself military weapons, inviting anti-Islamic fringe "experts" in to give training sessions, working with the CIA to monitor Muslims without cause all over the city, and possibly stepping into the FBI and CIA's jurisdiction through its own efforts.

Of historic interest is John Nash's (he of "A Beautiful Mind" biography/film) letter to the NSA shortly after they were formed. It predicted several advances in the mathmatical outlook in cryptograhpy as much as a quater of a century before they became common in the public cryptographic world.

Not only was this done without the knowledge of the local authorities or the ATF, the alleged illegal sales are not, according to the ATF agent quoted, actually illegal. The mayor of NYC claims the sting operation broke no laws since the people who actually went to the gun show to perform the sting were all residents of Arizona.

It's claimed "Direct messages between subscribers to websites such as Twitter would also be stored, as well as communications between players in online video games."
Anyone care to comment on the feasibility of cracking SSL on this scale ? What about breaking DNSSEC ?
And how are they going to decode every web sites protocol to extract the message ?

First off it needs to be said that the "torygraph" is so far right of center even the US "tea baggers" think it's run by people so right wing they would be embarrassed to be seen in their company.

Also the UK did not think this up by it's self, it comes from an EU Directive... Which it is rumourd was formulated by Ms Merkles friends to get around the restraint of German privacy Laws brought in many years ago to stop a repeate of dictatorships like the "National Socialist Party" (Nazi's and their ilk to the rest of us).

However they say things come "full circle" and in this case the "torygraph's" hate for all things EU has taken it so far right of center it's crossed the political "international dateline" and thus appears in this case to be well to the left of "the loony left"...

@Clive Robinson
This goes well beyond the needs of the EU retention directive (nasty as it is) and well beyond what *any other democracy in the world* feels is needed.
Hell, we didn't even need this when the IRA terrorists were actually *blowing people up every month*.

@Nathanel L.
Only the key is encrypted homomorphologic if I understand the website correctly. Data processing is still being done at customer site. More interesting would be homomorphic encryption which allows processing masses of encrypted data (in the cloud).

I wonder if Target (or other stores) attempt to track the pay-with-cash-only customers and assign them unique, persistent ID's.

Of course they do. This is what customer loyalty cards are for. I'm not sure what other "non-intrusive" measures are possible to track cash customers though. But most cash customers use cash for financial reasons rather than privacy, (so far as I know,) so unless the customer is at least minimally paranoid, stores won't have too much trouble implementing new tracking methods.